Relentless (aka Syphon) starts life as a home invasion movie, with all the requisite anxieties of that genre. However, it quickly moves beyond home invasion, hovering over other genres along the way, but holding hands with horror as its sustained, often grisly pursuit unfolds. It’s also the third film I’ve seen in almost as many films where someone is living out of their car: that’s a pretty damning indictment of the modern world all on its own, something which this film considers important, and in this case one of our key characters is a man called Teddy (Jeffrey Decker).
Teddy isn’t just down on his luck; he’s troubled, listening over old voicemails, presumably from his wife, in which he’s told that the ‘old’ Teddy is gone. Women only ever drift around on the periphery of this world. Elsewhere, soon after meeting Teddy, we bear witness to pure affluence. The trend now, if you’re hideously wealthy, seems to be to living in a concrete box with almost no possessions. That’s true of our currently-nameless second character (Shuhei Kinoshita), though he doesn’t look entirely at ease with his concrete box with its few possessions, and meditation doesn’t seem to help. He also seems to be having trouble logging into something on his laptop which, if we are to judge by the graphs and data streams we can see on his screen, is something important and lucrative. That’s all we need for now: we have witnessed two different sources of stress, and two men not saying a lot about what troubles them. A collision course is set, it seems.
It’d be an easy criticism if Relentless turned out not to be particularly relentless, but at least in its first third it is, and viscerally so. Director and writer Tom Botchii understands the mileage in presenting unanswered questions and mysteries, and whatever is driving the antipathy between these two men – enough so that Teddy is willing to find and attack the other – is a good source of pace, tension and forward impetus. Where it does start to slow down, however, it attempts to compensate for this by focusing more on ordeal – in fact, rather like a lot of the Noughties horror which was often largely static, with torture or torment taking place in a very small location. It’s always clear, until we get the exposition, that these men are each desperate to get hold of, or to retain a certain something: the film is at its best in this build-up. Actor Jeffrey Decker is a very important part of this tension, with much riding on his personal charisma as the script is minimal and simple, with barely anything said at all in the first act.
In fact, the more we know and the more we hear, the weaker the film becomes, ultimately offering up a fairly pedestrian and less than convincing – though no less personally galling – set of reasons for what’s going on. In this, it drops the mystery and justifies its deeds with a rationale on the part of each man which is tried-and-tested in one man’s case, and a little harder to entertain in the other man’s case. So the film loses something, though it hangs onto the motifs of shock and awe, overlaying many of its scenes with an often blaring soundtrack, using lots of handheld camera, fast edits and increasing levels of blood until the film is pretty much slick with it. Even when slower and even when less innovative, it’s a very violent and unflinching film, making the most of a limited budget and never feeling particularly low-budget.
If nothing else, it’s crystal clear that Relentless takes place in a deeply-fractured America, somewhere riven with the pain of being anonymous. Despite some issues connecting the dots, it’s a time capsule in its own right, born out of a time and place where division and inequality hold sway. In the background of one of the scenes, as a bloodied and prone Teddy sits back and contemplates his next move, there’s a piece of graffiti in the background which reads, ‘Squat the Air BNB’. In a way, this small detail is just as representative of the Relentless ethos as any other scene, even if not dripping with blood, barbed wire and broken noses.
Relentless (2025) is available on demand and digital now.